This chart demonstrates just how slow some of Apple's users are. (Source: Loyalytics)

The study looked at upgrade rates for the iPhone 3GS (left) and the Android-powered Motorola Droid (right). (Source: DailyMobile)

Android is handily beating iOS in terms of upgrade rates, making life easier for its developers

Market
researchers at Localytics looked at the Apple
iPhone 3GS and Motorola
Droid and upgrade rates to the latest respective OS versions
-- iOS
4.0 and Android
2.2 "Froyo" -- over their first two weeks of
availability. What they found was that nearly twice as many
Android users upgraded to the latest OS as iPhone
users.

The study showed
the dramatic benefits of Android's over-the-air OS updates --
something Apple has either been unable or unwilling to implement.
IOS 4.0 saw a steady crawl upwards in adoption rates, that allowed it
to temporarily get ahead of Android 2.2.

But when
the Android OTA packages landed, in a single day the Android 2.2
adoption jumped incredibly from around 42 percent to around 92
percent. By the end of two weeks, Android's upgrade totals had
reached 96 percent, while Apple had a mere 56 percent.

One
thing Loyalytics says the study shows is that iPhone users are using
iTunes less. If they had plugged into iTunes they would have
been prompted to update, but many users still appeared not to have
connected after almost two weeks. This may be a result of Apple
enabling over-the-air content downloads from its iTunes store, which
is directly accessible from the iPhone.

However, the study
brings mixed news to developers on both fronts. For Android
developers the rapid updates are good in a way, because they can be
assured a homogeneous platform. It can also be bad, because if
an update breaks your app, you may only have have a couple of days to
fix the problem before the majority of users can't use it.

For
iPhone developers the opposite is true. The platform is more
heterogeneous in terms of OS versions, which can be confusing as to
which versions to target and when. On the other hand, iPhone
devs have more time to fix bugs created by OS updates.

The
researchers conclude:

The
extent to which the iPad is or isn’t cannibalizing PC sales is
being debated. But it seems reasonable to assume that even fewer
iPads will be plugged into computers than iPhones, suggesting that
iPad upgrades to iOS 4.2 later this year will lag iPhone upgrades. At
some point, Apple will probably need/want to provide OTA upgrades to
both the iPad and iPhone, at least over WiFi.

Of
course as anyone who knows Apple could tell you, the company is sure
to take adopting this new feature at its own pace, however fast or
slow that may be.

"So, I think the same thing of the music industry. They can't say that they're losing money, you know what I'm saying. They just probably don't have the same surplus that they had." -- Wu-Tang Clan founder RZA